Eets has a daft name, but is a fantastic puzzle game suitable for all ages. Guiding Eets across a precarious landscape towards his destination, a jigsaw puzzle piece (all the world’s puzzles have apparently been broken), by manipulating his emotional state and (of course) blowing things up, the game constantly feels fresh, imaginative and most importantly fun.

Each level starts paused, and you need to position objects around the screen. When you’re happy, clicking on ‘Play’ will start the level, and Eets will wander on his way, interacting with objects in his path. Eating some marshmallows will make him happy, so he will hop off ledges. Some will make him angry, so he’ll leap from them. And some will make him scared, so he will turn back from a ledge and go the other way. The game throws up several challenging puzzles just using the marshmallow buds, but quickly introduces Prankster Whales, who can suck up objects (including Eets) and blow them across the screen, Exploding Pigs, Exploding Marshmallows, Bomb Carts, Choco Clouds, a whole variety of things that can alter Eets’s emotional state and help the player remove obstacles.

Controlled mostly by the mouse, the game’s tutorial makes it easy to pick up, but it’s very difficult to master. As you progress through the levels, you need to start placing objects with pinpoint precision to avoid killing little Eets, and firing chocolate drops with expert timing (trust me on this). The difficulty curve is steep but never off-putting to a casual player.

Eets is a sort of rabbit-shaped white creature with an expressive face. He’s adorable, even when angry, and has a wide range of animation. The other sprites don’t have nearly so much in the way of animation, but their little sequences are all smooth and often entertaining, particularly the sneezing pigs and prankster whales. The backgrounds are all well-drawn and it looks incredibly slick. The music is quite twee, as are the sound effects, but they are competently executed and add to the game’s professional presentation. With the single exception of a sprite called ‘Default texture’ on one of the later tutorials…

Creativity and innovation

While Lemmings is fairly clearly an inspiration to the game’s designers, Eets feels new and exciting. Great effort has been made to give real character to all the little sprites, even marshmallows, and the puzzle creator is another neat little touch which has been intelligently designed. Eets is fantastic fun and deserves to be a colossal success.